Garden

A performance-focused multi-media engine.

Building

Unfortunately, building is not as simple as zig build.

1. sh build_deps.sh - Builds all dependencies (NRI, Slang, etc.) with complex build steps. The artifacts of these are saved into external/<lib>/*. The dependency sources are pulled from tools/dependency-manager which references build_config.zon.
2. zig build - Builds everything else; will detect if step 1's dependencies haven't been built and run step 1 with default settings if so.

TODO

Basic Rendering
Vulkan via SDL3 GPU - Will eventually convert to either full Vulkan or WebGPU - Ideally with an RHI
Swapchain rendering
ImGui Debug Window
Shader Compilation
Online shader compilation with slang's compilation API
Offline shader compilation (invoke in build.zig)
Dedicated thread with persistent compilation session
Engine Architecture
"Objects"
Imperative Usage
ECS(?) - Not particularly a fan of the method, will need to benchmark against imperative.
Lights (but not well) - A non-cohesive mess of objects.
Lighting
Reflectance Models
Single color (Lights)
Flat Shading (Surface normals)
Phong (Vertex normals)
Blinn-Phong
Models
Stable ABI/API
OBJ with tinyobjloader-c
GLTF - Will require a rework of "objects"
LODs
Static
Dynamic
Materials

• Per OBJ Material Descriptions
  Ambient
  Color
  Map/Texture
  Diffuse
  Color
  Map/Texture
  Specular
  Color
  Map/Texture
  Highlight/Exponent/Shininess
  Map/Texture
  Transmittance
  Emission
  IOR
  Dissolve
  Illum
  Bump Map
  Displacement Map
  Alpha Map
  Textures
  Online
  Offline
  Some textures are appearing on the back of meshes when they are shown on both sides in blender.
  Streaming
  Binary Resource Cache
• Can be loaded with runtime-loaded and embedded data.
  Post-processing
  HDR
  Bloom
  AA
  Gamma Correction
  Skybox
  Environment Lighting
  Scene
  Frustum culling (AABB/Compute)
  BVH
  Audio
  Mono/Stereo
  Spatial
  Physics
  Assets
  Offline Compression
  Streaming
  Multi-threading
  Hot-reloading
  Shader recompilation
  Needs caching
  Models
  Lights
  Perhaps a better scene description format (OpenUSD)
  Debugging
  Tracy Zones / Allocation Tracking
  Validation Layers